


but i fear that to fall in love with you (is to fall from a great and gruesome height)

by fuzzbucket



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/M, Iowa, Road Trips, Tequila, angstapalooza, dar williams songs - Freeform, serious angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:08:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22853740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuzzbucket/pseuds/fuzzbucket
Summary: Meredith, after the events of "A Diagnosis."A trip, harsh realizations, and loneliness.
Relationships: Meredith Grey & Alex Karev, Meredith Grey & Cristina Yang, Meredith Grey/Andrew DeLuca, Meredith Grey/Derek Shepherd
Comments: 2
Kudos: 54





	but i fear that to fall in love with you (is to fall from a great and gruesome height)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry. This is super angsty. No one's happy here (but then, no one at Seattle Grace seems to be, anyway). Don't hate me. Title and song lyrics are from Dar Williams' "Iowa," which fits too well for the subject matter.

_And so for you, I came this far across the tracks,  
Ten miles above the limit, and with no seatbelt, and I'd do it again,  
For tonight I went running through the screen doors of discretion,  
For I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see,  
You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa,  
And you were not thinking of me._

She’s packing a bag before she even realizes what she’s doing. Underwear, socks, some t-shirts. She calls the babysitter and tells her she needs a few days. Tanya is blissfully nonchalant about it. She books an outrageous first class flight – who flies first class to Des Moines, other than presidential candidates? – and grabs her phone on the way out the door.

She avoids Maggie’s concerned eyes and says nothing to Amelia. She can’t lean on them now. They have each other. They are dealing with their own unique sets of problems. 

This is just garden-variety heartbreak. Nothing to a dead cousin or terrified expecting moms.

She kisses her kids, tells them she’ll be back in a few days, and heads out the door.

It’s not until she’s in her seat, glass of cheap champagne in hand, pulling pills off the airplane blanket nervously with one hand – that she realizes that she’s not sure which heartbreak she even means.

Andrew has broken her romantic heart. Just when she thought she was getting her younger self back, just when she thought they’d be able to get past it – she was wrong. There’s no coming back from a fight like that. When he said they were done – they were _done._

And she knows, theoretically, that it wasn’t him talking. That it was the mania and the hurt and the exhaustion. The Andrew who fell in love with her was not the Andrew who broke up with her, viciously, in front of her peers and colleagues. In front of Hayes, the closest thing she has to a friend in the hospital right now.

But Alex…

Alex has broken her entire heart. Her spirit. The very center of her being. _Womb to tomb, ride or die_ , she’d remembered writing in her journal one night. If she can’t depend on him anymore…

There’s no one.

She contemplates this lonely thought as the plane taxis toward the runway, her anxiety shooting up as the engines whir louder and the plane makes its final turn. Gravity pushes her back into the seat as the wheels pick up speed, hurling this flying death tube toward Puget Sound.

She grabs hold of the armrests as the plane takes off. _This was a very bad idea, Meredith_ , and she grabs the airsickness bag out of the seatback pocket and breathes deeply into it, one hand still white-knuckling the armrest.

When the plane levels off and the seatbelt sign dings, she puts down the bag. She doesn’t even look across the aisle to see if her fellow passengers have taken note of her distress. She just leans back, closes her eyes, and breathes.

_“Meredith,” he murmurs quietly. They’re sitting across from one another in the cafeteria and she’s debating whether she should pull him into an on-call room. There’s nothing obvious about what they’re doing, but pulling him across a crowded cafeteria into a room with a locked door would certainly give it away._

_“Meredith,” he murmurs again, slightly louder. She looks directly at him now and he’s got a smirk on his face, like he knows exactly what she’s thinking._

_“Yes, Dr. Deluca?” She raises an eyebrow at him._

_“I had a question about the cholecystectomy patient from earlier. I left some notes in your office, could we go check?”_

_She wants to laugh, but she can’t, so she keeps her face straight. “Sounds good. You can brief me on the way there.”_

_She knows there was no cholecystectomy patient earlier, and there are no notes in her office._

_There are, however, blinds that shut and a door that locks._

“Ma’am?” A flight attendant taps her shoulder, and her eyes snap open. “More champagne?”

Meredith nods. She rarely takes pills to fly – though she supposes no one could blame her – but alcohol will help. 

***

When she lands, the buzz has worn off and she’s a combination of shot nerves, wooly mouth, and bleeding heart.

For a brief moment, she lets herself think of what Derek might think if he could see her right now. Running from one problem toward another. Abandoning their kids with the babysitter. Leaving his heavily pregnant sister to cry alone.

When she picks up her rental car – small, suitable, quiet – she lets herself in, sits in the driver’s seat, and lets a few solitary tears slide down her cheeks.

She’s lost everything before, and this isn’t that. But why does it feel that way?

She feeds the address Jo gave her into her phone’s GPS and starts driving. Three hours through cornfields and snow. She puts classical music on in the background to calm her shattered nerves and thinks about what she wants to say.

 _You left Jo_. As an opening salvo, it’s the one that will get him the worst.

 _You lost your hospital. You abandoned Richard_. He abandoned the closest person she has to a father, a man who is now spiraling.

 _You left your patients_. Sick kids who need his expertise, who are now working with doctors less competent, less caring, and less thoughtful than him.

_You left Zola and Bailey and Ellis, and you’re the closest to a father they have._

_You left me. You abandoned me._

After all these years, it is now just her, and she can’t believe it. _How is it just me_ , she muses to herself, _how am I the one that’s survived the longest_?

She wonders how she could possibly have faulted Andrew for not having an instinct for self-preservation. It’s not like she does, either. She’s stayed in this place that’s failed her, hurt her, damaged her over and over again, the very definition of insanity.

If Andrew’s manic, she might be just plain stupid.

Maybe it’s time to start over. Somewhere else. Do what Ellis did and run to Boston. Do what a younger Meredith did and pick up the kids and run off with no forwarding address.

Darkness is falling by the time she pulls onto the street where Alex’s mom lives. She pulls up to the curb outside the house and looks in. The lights are on and she sees movement in one of the windows. 

“Now or never,” she mutters to herself, and swings open her car door. She steps out, stretches, and looks around, trying to place a much-younger Alex in this quiet residential neighborhood.

She walks up to the door, tentatively, and reaches out to knock; she’s met by the door opening to reveal Alex, whose face falls when he sees her. That, more than anything, hurts the most.

“You’re alive,” she says flatly.

“What are you doing here?” He shoots a quick look behind him, then steps out onto the porch. He’s standing under the porch light and she sees immediately – he’s lost weight, his eyes have sunken in their sockets, his hair is significantly grayer.

“Checking on you. You disappeared. Everyone needs you.”

He frowns. “They need me here, too, Mere.”

She swallows, looks away. “I need you.”

She sees this hit him, hurtling them both back in time.

“I can’t do this right now.” And he recedes back into the house, shutting the door behind him, closing her off.

She stands there in shock for a moment, left in the dark – quite literally, as he shuts off the porch light – by her best friend. Her person.

She autopilots to the nearest hotel, mind a million miles from this empty cornfield. There’s a suite she tells herself she’s allowed to get, and the minute she gets in she strips off her clothes and hits the minibar, pouring tiny bottles of tequila into ice-filled glasses while she lies on the bed in her underwear.

How fitting, she muses to herself, that she should lose Andrew and Alex in one go.

In her memories, they’re tangled up. The post-Derek days when Alex was her rock, and Deluca was a kid in her class.

Then, the incident, Alex’s knuckles imprinted into Andrew’s face. She flashes back to blood on the floor, Jo a wreck, Andrew in a hospital bed.

 _Ride or die_. She laughs, a bitter, mirthless laugh

She rationalizes to herself: she’s been dumped. Harshly. By both her best friend and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend and her best friend. She doesn’t know what order to put them in. She’s not sure which one hurts more.

Her phone rings and she glances. Cristina.

“Hey,” wincing at the sound of her own voice, flat and yet razor-sharp.

“So, uh,” and she hears concern in Cristina’s voice, “McWidow called.”

“Can you not call him that?” she replies, a blade on ice. “He’s Hayes.”

“Whatever.” Cristina blows out an exasperated sigh. “He told me what happened with the resident.”

“Yeah.” Meredith twists a swizzle stick between her fingers.

“I thought you guys were already broken up?”

It’s Meredith’s turn to sigh. “I mean, sort of. I don’t really want to talk about this now.”

Cristina’s quiet for a minute and Meredith worries the connection went out. “Where are you?”

Meredith laughs again, again a humorless, flat laugh. “Iowa.”

“Searching for Evilspawn?”

“I found him.” And she tells her what happened, her forever person. Cristina listens, faithful and quiet.

“It’s not him in there, I think.”

Cristina snorts. “Clearly.”

“He just seemed,” Meredith searches for a word and fails, “absent.”

She hears Cristina drumming a pencil on the desk on the other side of the phone line. “So you’ve had a shit week.”

“A shit _year_ , Cristina.”

“Okay, but especially a shit week.”

“Yes. And don’t think sending me another Irishman will fix it.”

Cristina laughs at that. “He can be a good friend to you, if you let him.”

Meredith _harumphs_. “And he’ll just fuck off somewhere like everyone else.”

“Low blow, Mere.”

Meredith frowns. “Not you. You… that makes sense to me. And you haven’t disappeared from my life. But Izzie, George, now Alex… vanished without a trace, or almost.”

Silence again from the other line. “Yeah.”

“And Lexie, and Derek, and now Andrew…”

“Yeah.”

Meredith swirls her tequila around in her glass, watching the oily liquid around the melting ice. “I’ve got Amelia now, and Maggie.”

“And your kids.”

“I can’t tell my kids about this stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“Anything brilliant to say, Dr. Yang?”

Cristina’s quiet again. “You’ve earned some time to yourself. I don’t think this is how you wanted to get it, though.”

Meredith laughs. “No, it really isn’t.”

“Maybe you should go somewhere. Take the kids. Have a family vacation.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Meredith muses, shooting back the rest of her drink.

They talk for a little longer, Cristina about the guy she’s seeing (a pediatric surgeon who never wants kids) and Meredith about her experience with Suzanne’s case.

“Shit, there goes my pager. Chin up, Mere. It’ll get better. Or, you know, it won’t.” And Meredith laughs at that, hanging up the phone.

She decides Cristina’s right. She’ll take the kids on a trip. Maybe just to Portland, or camping, or Vancouver, but it’ll be good to get away.

And she needs to get the hell out of Iowa.

She calls up the airline, switches her ticket from two days hence to tomorrow morning. The change fee is exorbitant, but she’ll eat the cost. She needs to get away.

She empties out her glass and gets into bed, relishing the feel of the stiff clean sheets against her body, and wills herself to sleep. Too much has happened. None of it good. Maybe it’ll be better in the morning.

She sleeps fitfully, tortured by dreams. 

_“Dr. Grey,” he says, smiling wickedly at her. She runs after him, his dark curls shaking in the wind._

_Fire traces along the right side of her vision, and he’s running toward it._

_“Andrew, no!” she screams, but he disappears into the flames._

She wakes up gasping. She tries to calm herself back to sleep, but all that comes to mind is

_A baseball bat hitting a diamond ring._

It’s no use.

***

She hears the sound of knocking at the door behind the veil of the light sleep she’s trying to get.

“Go away,” she yells, eyeing her phone – it’s five in the morning.

“Mere.” It’s Alex. He pounds on the door again.

She jumps up and pulls on her pajamas and slides the door open to peer at him through the chain. “What?”

“Can we talk?” He looks desperate and wounded and against her will – her will that tells her to listen to her very fresh rage – she lets him in.

He barrels in and sits down on the floor next to her bed.

“I can’t be everything to everyone anymore, Meredith. I can’t.” He looks up at her and she sees pain in his eyes. “I want to be, but I can’t. I’m fraying at both ends.”

She sits down on the bed, looking down at him on the floor. “Alex.”

“My mom, she’s…” he exhales. “She’s okay, sometimes, But sometimes, she’s not. And now Amber is showing signs.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” And Alex unloads – his trip to Iowa he assumed was temporary, how he doesn’t think he can turn back.

“But Alex, what about Jo? Your wife?”

“I just can’t. Mere. She’s been through so much and I can’t drag her through this – my crazy family – when she just got healthy again.”

“That’s bullshit, Alex. You can talk to her. She’s strong.”

“But I’m not.”

They sit in silence for a moment. “You know Catherine bought your hospital?”

Alex snorts. “Yeah. Co-chief at Grey Sloan. No thanks.” 

“You have patients, Alex. My daughter. Zola.”

He shakes his head. “There are great pediatric surgeons in Seattle. They don’t have them here. I’m doing at least as much good. Plus, Hayes has a great reputation.”

It’s Meredith’s turn to snort. “Yes. And he’s as mouthy as you are.”

They both laugh for a moment. 

“Alex.”

He looks up at her, and she can’t stop herself from crying. “You left _me_ , Alex. Everyone leaves me. I never thought it would be you.”

He sighs, and she feels a pang of guilt for adding to his obvious distress. “I know.”

“Andrew had a manic episode. He broke up with me in front of the entire ICU. He called me a hypocrite.”

Alex looks at her, boggled. “What?”

“We’re done, apparently. Really, really done, not fake done and sleeping together. Done done.” Saying it out loud unleashes a torrent of rage and concern in her chest – for how everything happened, for Andrew, for herself. She breathes deeply, resting her chin against her chest. “And I needed you. I needed my friend. My person.”

“You have sisters. And Cristina.”

“But that’s not what I needed.”

“Meredith. This is the thing. It’s too much. I need some time to just… take care of _me_ , and _my family_. I’m finally in a position where I can and it’s not fair to ask me to change my priorities.”

She gets it, now. She sees what he was talking about. Alex has always carried people on his shoulders – his colleagues, his friends, his family. For the longest time, he struggled under the weight of it, under the weight of them all. 

But she thinks of Jo. “Jo’s your family.”

He looks away sharply. “Please don’t talk to me about Jo. I feel badly enough as it is.”

“You owe her an explanation, at least.” She gives him a steely stare, and he looks away again.

“I can’t, right now. I can’t.”

“What am I supposed to tell her?”

“Nothing, Meredith. This is between me and her. Leave it that way.” He stands up and heads toward the door.

“How can you give me an explanation, and not her?” she pleads, rising to her feet. In the dim light of the hotel room, she sees the dejected rise of his shoulders and the loose fit of his jeans.

“Because I’m Alex Karev, and it’s in my blood. I don’t need to explain my actions. I just need time. Please, just… give me time. Tell everyone to give me time.”

“How much?” She hates how small her voice sounds, how fractured.

“I don’t know.” He reaches to open the door, and she walks over to him and grabs his free hand.

“Please, Alex. Just talk to her.”

He looks at her and squeezes her hand quickly, then lets go. “No.” And he’s out the door and down the hallway.

She sees no reason to chase him. This is how he wants it to be, and this is how it’s going to be.

She lets the door shut and sits back down on the bed, heavily. The man she just spoke to – that’s not the man she thought he was.

The man who broke her heart the other day – he’s not who she thought he was, either.

She stands up quickly, picking her things up from around the room and throwing them into her overnight bag. The sun’s starting to rise out the window and there’s an orange hue casting over the room.

She’ll go to the airport. She’ll drink her weight in tequila at the bar. She’ll get on a plane and not hyperventilate through takeoff. 

She can make it on her own. She’s done it before.

She had just hoped she’d never have to do it again.

_“Meredith,” he whispers quietly. She’s resting against his chest in the small hours of the morning, after they’d been woken up by Bailey coming into the room. She’d put him back to bed, hoping Andrew would have fallen back asleep, but when she comes back he reaches for her._

_She’s not even sure why Andrew’s here; she’d invited him over, but had been certain he’d say no. Imagine her surprise when he showed up, cooked dinner, and largely let her be. They spent the whole night dancing around the subject at hand._

_“Meredith,” he says again, and she hums in acknowledgment._

_“Meredith, I know you don’t need me, but…”_

_She sits up, suddenly, searching for his eyes in the darkness, moonlight offering her enough illumination to find them. “What do you mean?”_

_“You’re fine being alone. You’ve done it for a long time. I know I’m kind of… superfluous, to your life.”_

_She shakes her head. “I’ve never said that. And I don’t know what gave you the impression that I feel that way.”_

_He sighs. “This was the wrong time to have this conversation.”_

_She shakes her head, too exhausted to argue. “It was.” She lies back down against him and rests her head on his chest again, listening to his steady heartbeat._

_“I need you, Meredith.” It’s barely a whisper, but she hears it. She presses a kiss to his chest._

_“I love you, Andrew.”_

As her plane taxis up the runway, away from this cursed prairie, she thinks back to what Andrew had said, all those weeks ago.

It wasn’t that she needed him – as he said, she has been on her own for a while before. 

But she didn’t want to live without him.

She gets the irony. She said it to Derek. She said it to Derek, and he died.

Andrew isn’t dead. But the man he was to her – the man he was until a few days ago – that man is gone, and she doesn’t have a choice.

Now, with her champagne clutched in one hand and her airsickness bag in the other, she realizes she’ll have to live without him.

Without the both of them.


End file.
